Related papers: Application of Statistical Physics to Politics
What is the probability that all the gas in a box accumulates in the same half of this box? Though amusing, this question underlies the fundamental problem of density fluctuations at equilibrium, which has profound implementations in many…
We here present a model of the dynamics of extremism based on opinion dynamics in order to understand the circumstances which favour its emergence and development in large fractions of the general public. Our model is based on the bounded…
We investigate the influence of diffraction on the statistics of energy levels in quantum systems with a chaotic classical limit. By applying the geometrical theory of diffraction we show that diffraction on singularities of the potential…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
For the voter model, we study the effect of a memory-dependent transition rate. We assume that the transition of a spin into the opposite state decreases with the time it has been in its current state. Counter-intuitively, we find that the…
The well-known Condorcet Jury Theorem states that, under majority rule, the better of two alternatives is chosen with probability approaching one as the population grows. We study an asymmetric setting where voters face varying…
We introduce the threshold $q$-voter opinion dynamics where an agent, facing a binary choice, can change its mind when at least $q_0$ amongst $q$ neighbors share the opposite opinion. Otherwise, the agent can still change its mind with a…
American democracy is currently heavily reliant on plurality in single-member districts, or PSMD, as a system of election. But public perceptions of fairness are often keyed to partisan proportionality, or the degree of congruence between…
Are there voting methods which (i) give everyone, including minorities, an equal share of effective power even if voters act strategically, (ii) promote consensus rather than polarization and inequality, and (iii) do not favour the status…
Equilibrium properties of many-body systems with a large number of degrees of freedom are generally expected to be described by statistical mechanics. Such expectations are closely tied to the observation of thermalization, as manifested…
An assembly of $n$ voters needs to decide on $t$ independent binary issues. Each voter has opinions about the issues, given by a $t$-bit vector. Anscombe's paradox shows that a policy following the majority opinion in each issue may not…
A large amount of literature in social choice theory deals with quantifying the probability of certain election outcomes. One way of computing the probability of a specific voting situation under the Impartial Anonymous Culture assumption…
Consider Plurality with random tie-breaking. This paper uses standard axiomatic extensions of preferences over elements to preferences over sets (Kelly, Gardenfors, Responsiveness) to characterize all better-replies of a voter under…
We introduce a simple model of opinion dynamics in which binary-state agents evolve due to the influence of agents in a local neighborhood. In a single update step, a fixed-size group is defined and all agents in the group adopt the state…
Classical spatial models of two-party competition typically predict convergence to the median voter, yet real-world party systems often exhibit persistent and asymmetric polarization. We develop a spatial model of two-party competition in…
In this paper, we discuss the possible generalizations of the Social Influence with Recurrent Mobility (SIRM) model developed in Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 158701 (2014). Although the SIRM model worked approximately satisfying when US election…
We address the question as to why, in the semiclassical limit, classically chaotic systems generically exhibit universal quantum spectral statistics coincident with those of Random Matrix Theory. To do so, we use a semiclassical resummation…
A simple example is used to show that renormalization group limit cycles of effective quantum theories can be studied in a new way. The method is based on the similarity renormalization group procedure for Hamiltonians. The example contains…
Statistical thermodynamics delivers the probability distribution of the equilibrium state of matter through the constrained maximization of a special functional, entropy. Its elegance and enormous success have led to numerous attempts to…
A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016…